[284] in Cypherpunks
Re: Early Battles
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Mon May 10 19:32:39 1993
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 09 May 1993 15:37:39 PDT."
Reply-To: pmetzger@lehman.com
Date: Mon, 10 May 1993 14:06:22 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>
Norman Hardy says:
> I remember hearing an anecdote from a fairly private but
> unclassified source. According to this source NSA was incensed when
> IBM first developed Lucifer for banking applications, especially
> because they published details in a Scientific American article. NSA
> accused IBM of stealing secrets from NSA thru IBM employees having
> access to NSA technology as part of their jobs developing hardware
> and software for NSA. IBM was of course prepared for this
> eventuality. They quoted an early paper by Shannon suggesting that a
> mixture of transpositions and permutations would likely produce
> strong ciphers. This is, of course, the heart of both Lucifer and
> DES.
> NSA backed off.
This sounds like an urban legend -- NSA and IBM worked way too closely
on the development of DES for this to sound likely.
.pm
